Steam Early Access has been around for awhile, and offers gamers a chance to support games in development, get early access, and provide feedback during the development process. Early access is also available on the Xbox One with its Game Preview program, and now GOG.com is joining the early access model with a few notable differences.
For starters, GOG.com is offering a 14-day no questions asked refund policy on its early access, DRM-free games. In addition, the games added to its early access program will be handpicked and carefully evaluated. It doesn’t matter if you’re having technical issues, if you don’t think the game is fleshed-out enough yet, or if it simply doesn’t click with you — all games in development can be returned for any reason.
“Our goal has always been to offer a selection of titles that are both excellent and worth your time. Nowadays, we’re seeing more games that are already great experiences while still in development,” says Piotr Karwowski, GOG.com Managing Director. “We want all gamers on GOG.com to have access to what these titles have to offer, but we want to get it right, carefully evaluating each and every game, offering a 14-day refund policy, and providing GOG Galaxy support with update rollback and more.”
GOG Galaxy support with update rollback is a great feature to add to early access especially, allowing gamers to roll back to a more stable version of the release if they need to.
“If a game update breaks something or introduces unwanted changes, GOG Galaxy lets you easily rollback to any previous version of your game while you wait for the fixes,” says Karwowski. “As an added bonus, rollback actually stores historical snapshots throughout a game’s development – that means you can always revisit any point in the game’s history with a single click.”
The first five games that GOG is releasing in the early access program are: Starbound, Ashes of the Singularity, Project Zomboid, TerraTech, and Curious Expeditions — all at 40 percent off until Feb. 2, at 1:59 p.m. GMT. The five initial games in the program are just the beginning, GOG has indicated that more titles will be released in the future, featuring a selection of the most promising games and those most highly requested on the GOG.com Community Wishlist.
What do you think about the differences in GOG’s early access program over Steam or the Xbox Game Preview programs? Let us know in the comments below, or on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.
[button link=”http://www.gog.com/” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: GOG[/button]
